Reading Nowhere in Erewhon: Bellamy, Morris, and New Zealand Dougal McNeill Utopias pursue one another. It is a polemical form, proceeding by way of re- writing and echoing, each visionary’s scheme getting built out of the material torn from a previous programme. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, an astonishing success in its own time, and rivalled only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin in sales, provoked William Morris to write News from Nowhere, a report from the ‘epoch of rest’ doubling as a critique of Bellamy’s perfected social order. News from Nowhere’s initial serial publication in Commonweal, the journal of the Socialist League edited by Morris, was, in turn, as Paul O’Flinn has argued, an intervention into the League’s politics, with Morris’ unnamed hero ‘damning the rest for fools’ (Morris 43) and arguing his case as much against the anarchist currents in the League as against Bellamy’s consumerist vision. News from Nowhere, as Matthew Beaumont argues, ‘sets out to realise a future state that is qualitatively different from the idealised reality evoked by some of [Morris’] contemporaries’ and acts as ‘an attempt to defuse the power of Looking Backward. It cancels out one promissory note with another’ (69). The 1890s saw, in Beaumont’s neat phrase, ‘a veritable discursive explosion’ (1) in Utopian production globally; it was in this era that the fruit- juice drinkers and sandal-wearers of Orwell’s famous list were born, and their presence, in literature and politics, shaped the culture of the fin-de- siècle. New Zealand was particularly receptive to the shards and fragments that flew out from this explosion, Erewhon and the ‘land without strikes’ having been, after all, the site itself of a great deal of utopianism. ‘Utopia,’ Dominic Alessio has suggested, ‘was central to the nation’s culture and resulted in the paradise myth emerging as one of its dominant tropes’ (22). Looking Backward, Bellamy’s story of an aristocratic Bostonian woken from hypnotic sleep to see his city in its cleanliness and splendour in the year 2000, ruled over by a benign but all-controlling state in command of an industrial army, enjoyed what Lyman Tower Sargent has called ‘immense popularity’ (171) in New Zealand. Press reports discussed the novel in 1889, Bellamy, Morris and New Zealand Dougal McNeill just months after its American publication and before stock had reached New Zealand. Excerpts were published in several newspapers through 1890. There were at least three local editions, and enormous interest and sales. The Dunedin Evening Star ran a report from Braithwaite’s Book Arcade on 17th April 1890: ‘I have sold 5 000 copies of this marvellous Socialistic book since I reviewed it in the Star about six months ago’; similar accounts appear in newspapers across the country.1 What then of Morris? His Utopian rejoinder travelled with Bellamy to New Zealand, certainly; Alexander Turnbull owned copies of both works, as well as keeping standing orders with Morris’ Kelmscott Press. The quarrel was hardly on equal local terms, however; there were no local editions of News from Nowhere, and it gathered together nothing approaching the attention Looking Backward generated. 2 Bellamy enjoyed phenomenal international success and, as Carl Guarneri has suggested, ‘the generic quality of Bellamy’s utopia helped it to travel well. Looking Backward’s plan is universally applicable, not the product of a particular national context or socialist sect […] there is little uniquely American about Looking Backward’s programme, [and] its implementation is also not conditioned by local or national traits’ (19). It is unsurprising, then, that scholars have passed to Bellamy without mentioning Morris’ New Zealand reception. Something does get missed along the way, however; my purpose in this essay is to restore some sense of the Utopian competition that went on as the two works were received in New Zealand. This, in turn, offers chances to look at the more general literary culture of the period in a different way. Jane Stafford and Mark Williams’ demand, in their Maoriland, that research shake off the assumptions of belatedness as ‘one of the signs of provincialism’ bequeathed to us by Curnow is reinforced by a consideration of Utopian energies in the period. ‘Advanced trends as well as dated ones circulate through the writing of the period,’ they observe. ‘The centre- periphery model of empire needs to be modified to accommodate the complex cross-affiliations and influences of the period. Literary nationalism’s exclusive focus on the local ignores, and even denies, the international sources of the local.’ (16) Utopian literature is one of the ‘international sources of the local’; reading Morris alongside Bellamy contributes to the modification Stafford and Williams call for, drawing our attention to the different ways ‘literature’ and the ‘literary’ were deployed in the period. Kōtare: New Zealand Notes & Queries 2014 Page 2 Bellamy, Morris and New Zealand Dougal McNeill Looking Backward and News from Nowhere, both international sources, were read as ‘local’ texts. Bellamy’s ‘rather remarkable work’ was, for the Auckland Star’s reviewer, ‘written on somewhat the same lines as Sir Julius Vogel’s new book [Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman’s destiny]’ (9/9/89, 4). The ‘impossible and utterly impracticable schemes’ of the Wellington Liberal Association were, the Wairarapa Times’ Wellington correspondent mocked, dreams of ‘making the ideal State of New Zealand like unto Morris’ ideal England as set forth in his Socialistic and Utopian romance’ (19/4/93, 2). A tale from the Pall Mall Gazette, reprinted in several local papers, quoted a New Zealand employer in a hotel in Glasgow: ‘it pays to make workpeople contented and happy.’ He had ordered eight dozen copies of Looking Backward as he was ‘so delighted with the millennium Bellamy had foreshadowed’; circulating the text was for his employees’ literary edification and to boost productivity.3 ‘Pater’ a regular columnist in the Otago Witness, called Looking Backward and News from Nowhere ‘books on the table of every reader interested in the advance of social events’ (30/7/91, 36); their place on that local table is the focus of this essay. THE BELLAMY BOOM ‘Bellamy’s little brochure is just now the rage of the hour and we are afraid to mention how many of the various editions we are told have been circulated in Auckland alone’; this was how the booksellers Wildman advertised fresh copies of Looking Backward in 1890. 4 The novel sold rapidly, and quickly became a part of the colony’s intellectual and cultural thought world. William Pember Reeves serialised it in the Lyttleton Times through August 1889; later that year a short story of Reeves, ‘A Helpless Spectator’, published in the first issue of Zealandia, could assume enough readerly familiarity with Bellamy to be studded with intertextual references. Articles by ‘Pharos’ (Reeves) in later issues of the Lyttleton Times expounded Bellamy’s themes.5 Fictionalised responses appeared within a year of Looking Backward’s first publication, with the Press serialising a ‘Looking Forward’ (the first of many), and all the major newspapers ran advertisements for the work through 1890. 6 Described as a ‘brilliant romance’ and a ‘charming book’, Looking Backward’s success became news in itself. Columns through 1890 speculate on Bellamy’s wealth and report on his extraordinary sales abroad. The novel was dramatised and adapted for the stage; a racehorse was named after its author!7 Kōtare: New Zealand Notes & Queries 2014 Page 3 Bellamy, Morris and New Zealand Dougal McNeill The novel’s reception illustrates too how the boundaries between ‘literary’ writing and persuasive or politically-directed prose were still porous in this period of New Zealand’s literary history. Bellamy introduced his novel as both a ‘romantic narrative’ (3) and as a ‘forecast […] of the next stage in the industrial and social development of humanity’ (195); if later readers have struggled with this, for us, generic incongruity, contemporary New Zealand readers took them in combination. It was read by literary societies and political meetings, denounced from the pulpit and defended from a Christian viewpoint. The Social Reform Association ‘referred to [it] at length’ during a Dunedin meeting, while ‘laughter and applause’ followed an ironic mention of Looking Backward at the Exhibition Mining Conference of March 1890. Public lectures and discussions of Looking Backward were organised by members of the Presbyterian Church in Ashburton, the St John’s Literary Society in Wellington, the Wanganui Musical and Literary Society, the Mount Eden Young Men’s Improvement Association and the Taranaki Mutual Improvement Society. Wellington Spiritualists even listened to a lecture on Looking Backward before forming their circles and beginning a séance.8 Bellamy’s Utopian programme—an industrial army, state ownership, social peace—were picked up by politicians, with Mr James Allen, the Member of Parliament for Dunedin East, concluding a meeting with references to Looking Backward, while opponents of the ‘half-holiday movement in Dunedin’ blamed its popularity on ‘Edward Bellamy’s excessively stupid book.’ Kate Sheppard, speaking in Christchurch in 1892, made the case for women to be treated ‘as units in the industrial army,’ a clear reference to Bellamy.9 Further Utopian production is the surest sign of a Utopia’s generic success, and Looking Backward provoked these. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ published Looking Upwards; or, Nothing New in Auckland in 1892 in order to ‘show how we are to reach the state pictured by Bellamy, and to show that we must go on in that direction, or back to barbarism’ (7). An ‘Edward Bellamy Society’ published a Prospectus of New Zealand Limited in 1910. The discursive engine had started whirring; so many Utopian schemes and fancies were the result.